Enigmatic Quotes

• The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.

  Aldous Huxley

  Inspirational, Birthday, History

  Aldous Huxley (1971). “The devils of Loudon”

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• The interest in life does not lie in what people do, nor even in their relations to each other, but largely in the power to communicate with a third party, antagonistic, enigmatic, yet perhaps persuadable, which one may call life in general.

  Virginia Woolf

  Life, Lying, Party

  1925 The Common Reader, 'On Not Knowing Greek'.

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• The New York Times' was enigmatic: 'Some unimaginable gravitational force is pulling our entire galaxy in the opposite direction.' End of article. If you stop and think about that, we are recreating ourselves.

  Dwight Schultz

  New York, Thinking, Opposites

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• Vampires are so old that they don't need to impress anyone anymore. They're comfortable in their own skin. It's this enigmatic strength that's very romantic and old-fashioned. I think it goes back to something of a Victorian attitude of finding a strong man who's going to look after his woman.

  Stephen Moyer

  Strong, Attitude, Men

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• It has been said that the myth is a public dream, dreams are private myths. Unfortunately we give our mythic side scant attention these days. As a result, a great deal escapes us and we no longer understand our own actions. So it remains important and salutary to speak not only of the rational and easily understood, but also of enigmatic things: the irrational and the ambiguous. To speak both privately and publicly.

  Mary Zimmerman

  Dream, Giving, Important

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• And enigmatic smile is worth ten pages of dialog.

  Connie Brockway

  Smile, Acting, Pages

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• I think that there's a natural attraction to enigmatic characters, people that have decided to make a decision in their lives to live differently than everyone else. That's a very attractive quality that also happens to be good for filmmaking, people that have their own point of view and aren't looking at things the same way as everyone else.

  Jim Carrey

  Character, Thinking, People

  Source: deadline.com

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• I heard Joby Talbot's Hovercraft piece for orchestra and felt its immediate physical impact - visceral, unsettling, hungry and direct. These short five minutes became our keystone to unlocking a strangely seductive score that tensions the aggressive force of the White Stripes with the enigmatic beauty of Talbot's own compositions.

  Wayne McGregor

  White, Impact, Seductive

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• My greatest strength is to have a great capacity to confront myself no matter how unpleasant. My greatest weakness is that I don't. I know that's enigmatic, but that's sort of a general formula for anyone, actually.

  William S. Burroughs

  Weakness, Matter, Capacity

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• Truth is a woman. That is why it is enigmatic.

  Lawrence Durrell

  Truth, Truth Is

  Lawrence Durrell (2012). “The Alexandria Quartet: Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea”, p.317, Faber & Faber

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• The true work of art is born from the 'artist': a mysterious, enigmatic, and mystical creation. It detaches itself from him, it acquires an autonomous life, becomes a personality, an independent subject, animated with a spiritual breath, the living subject of a real existence of being.

  Wassily Kandinsky

  Spiritual, Art, Real

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• Nothing is wholly obvious without becoming enigmatic. Reality itself is too obvious to be true .

  Jean Baudrillard

  Truth, Reality, Becoming

  Jean Baudrillard (2001). “Selected Writings”, p.270, Stanford University Press

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• The years... when I pursued the inner images were the most important time of my life. Everything else is to be derived from this. It began at that time, and the later details hardly matter anymore. My entire life consisted in elaborating what had burst forth from the unconscious and flooded me like an enigmatic stream and threatened to break me. That was the stuff and material for more than only one life. Everything later was merely the outer classification, the scientific elaboration, and the integration into life. But the numinous beginning, which contained everything was then.

  Carl Jung

  Years, Important, Details

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• I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about my faults.

  Dick Cheney

  Thinking, Faults, Funny Bush

  "The World According To Dick Cheney" by Noel Murray, tv.avclub.com. March 15, 2013.

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• I get interested in writers who are enigmatic.

  Harry Hamlin

  "People's Past Sexiest Men", abcnews.go.com.

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• If I completely understood what was going on and I understood these songs, they wouldn't make sense to play live anymore. They're still enigmatic for me. I'm still searching in the songs as they are. That's what's actually been the most fun about playing and touring for me is that there's still a lot of caverns in the songs where you can go and hide out different nights.

  Justin Vernon

  Song, Fun, Night

  Source: pitchfork.com

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• Literature takes a habit of mind that has disappeared. It requires silence, some form of isolation, and sustained concentration in the presence of an enigmatic thing.

  Philip Roth

  Silence, Mind, Literature

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• If you do a character, always make the character with a big question mark. Even if the character is very enigmatic and all over the place, make him always with a question mark, because if you turn a question mark upside down, like they do in South America in Spanish, then it becomes a hook.

  Peter Stormare

  Character, America, Hook

  Source: collider.com

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• A long-dead angel who thought to own me,” was his enigmatic answer, the silver in his eyes almost liquid. “I tore out his throat. After that, I ate his liver and his heart. The remaining internal organs weren’t as tasty so I gave them to his other creatures.” Elena’s hand tightened on the handle of the knife, conscious Naasir carried gleaming blades of his own in the sheaths strapped to his arms. “I wouldn’t think a vampire who killed an angel would be permitted to live.” A slow, feral smile. “I didn’t say I killed him.

  Nalini Singh

  Heart, Eye, Angel

  Nalini Singh (2013). “Archangel's Legion”, p.90, Penguin

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• 'De nada,' replied Gregorius. The Portuguese couple sat down, the train went on. Gregorius was never to forget this scene. They were his first Portuguese words in the real world and they worked. That words could cause something in the world, make someone move or stop, laugh or cry: even as a child he had found it extraordinary and it had never stopped impressing him.

  Pascal Mercier

  Morning, Children, Real

  "Night Train To Lisbon".

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• His face was in my neck and he was breathing hard. Was he grieving me? Already? Would he miss me? Had I, in some tiny way, come to matter to this enigmatic, hard, brilliant, obsessed man? I realised he'd come to matter to me. Good or evil, right or wrong, he mattered to me.

  Karen Marie Moning

  Men, Grieving, Breathing

  Karen Marie Moning (2007). “Bloodfever”, Random House LLC

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• Places are fragmentary and inward-turning histories, pasts that others are not allowed to read, accumulated times that can be unfolded but like stories held in reserve, remaining in an enigmatic state, symbolizations encysted in the pain or pleasure of he body. 'I feel good here': the well-being under-expressed in the language it appears in like a fleeting glimmer is a spatial practice.

  Michel de Certeau

  Pain, Past, Practice

  Michel de Certeau (2011). “The Practice of Everyday Life”, p.108, Univ of California Press

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• What passes for love is imperfect knowledge. Not knowing, initially, allows faithlessness to dress up as its opposite; casts the inarticulate as enigmatic, the selfish as forgetful, the angry as impassioned.

  Nick Laird

  Selfish, Love Is, Opposites

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• A message in a bottle is one of the most intriguing things that you can find, the circumstance and method of delivery forever hidden but just the message sitting there, enigmatic, to decode.

  Bill Gothard

  Forever, Bottles, Sitting

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• I wished for eternal and intriguing muteness. I would be the Mysterious Dumb Girl, the Enigmatic Elf. The human voice no longer interested me.

  Lorrie Moore

  Girl, Voice, Dumb

  Lorrie Moore (2012). “Who Will Run the Frog Hospital”, p.6, Vintage

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